Mail Mole (Switch)

In Mail Mole, the adorable mole mailman Molty becomes a platform game hero as he needs to help the people of Carrotland restore power to Pleasant Plaza. Molty’s cuteness definitely seems to be a selling point, the player able to collect carrots in stages for the sole purpose of buying new outfits for the tiny protagonist. Oddly enough though, almost all of the time you’ll spend playing Mail Mole, Molty will be out of sight as he primarily gets around the game world by tunneling underground.

 

Mail Mole’s 3D platforming stages are almost completely focused on challenges of movement and speed, there being no actual enemies standing in Molty’s path to delivering the letters that contain reactivation codes for the plaza’s power. There are boss fights to be found between worlds and as a capstone to the adventure when you find out who is responsible for the outages, but even as you fight a pirate turtle who brings a sword to the battle again and again, he kindly stands in the middle of a machine and doesn’t try to hurt you. Instead, those boss battles stick to the design focus on pure platforming challenges, Molty needing to move around the boss arena to hit switches while dodging whatever little hazards are in his way.

Regular levels follow this formula pretty closely as well, although the game gets off to a fairly poor start in areas like the farm and ruins. The opening levels of Mail Mole are incredibly bland, putting up almost no fight as you can easily make your way through the level unopposed. It’s a very concerning start that almost makes the game feel like it will have no bite, but once you leave the rather basic opening section, the game starts to introduce areas where you’ll actually be challenged a bit. Jumps will become tighter or only available for a short amount of time, disappearing platforms enter the mix, and various area hazards like shockwaves, spinning spiked logs, and fireballs threaten to kill Molty if you can’t get around them safely. The area ideas progress as you move onto areas like a beach, spooky swamp, icy mountain, and desert, but besides a few like the one with a large rolling log of death, a nifty desert level where the level comes at you by appearing gradually from behind a wall of sand, and a beach level you spend most of your time bouncing on trampolines, many levels still keep a relaxed pace where you can navigate at whatever speed you like.

 

There are a few levels devoted to gaining incredible amounts of speed, these long courses about hitting boosters, jumping at the right time, and picking which of the branching paths ahead look like they’ll serve your purpose best. These can whizz by a little too quickly if you aren’t concerned with the optional collectibles though. Besides the carrots you can spend at Rick’s Store to get new outfits, there are large radishes often hidden away from the main path or positioned so you’ll need to do some mildly tricky platforming to reach them. Mail Mole does gradually grow in difficulty as you near the conclusion so that the finale actually requires some fairly good movement and speed, but the path there might be a little too soft with the player even if they are trying to find the extra radishes. The optional races with Scarlett the skunk’s Mecha-Moles do at least require you to start figuring out more optimal movement options and level paths in specific stages, but Mail Mole’s 8 worlds with 4 levels each mostly just manage out to decent because some stage ideas barely try anything interesting while others crank up the difficulty or bring in a neat gimmick to sustain them.

Perhaps one reason Mail Mole feels like it lacks anything exceptional is how its platforming was designed. As mentioned earlier, Molty spends most of the adventure tunneling through the ground, the player mostly watching the dirt he knocks up as he digs around. You can collect objects above you while tunneling so grabbing carrots and radishes doesn’t require surfacing over and over, but this does mean a lot of the adventure locks Molty into the ground. He can be damaged while tunneling still and thus he needs to hop over things like swinging logs or energy pulses, but it does feel like a good amount of time is spent just moving around in this way and those weak early stages are egregious in that they barely put forward anything beyond a lot of ground to dig through and easy jumps. Jumping out of the ground is easy and responsive, and if you time things right, you can even get a burst of speed when you land back in the dirt. This speed burst and a rather slow ground pound are your means for breaking open objects, but doing so is mostly for optional collectibles rather than enhancing level interactivity. Mail Mole does get to a point where it is challenging your jump and speed often enough to not lose the player, but it really doesn’t utilize many other ideas for spicing up the action, even its few small puzzles being as basic as pushing the right colored beach balls into the matching holes.

 

Mail Mole is the first game by fledgling developer Talpa Games comprised of a small team of fresh university graduates, and while I didn’t know they were from Spain until I looked them up, I had a hunch they might be because of how Spanish leaks into the English translation. At one point in the adventure, the mayor of Pleasant Plaza spook an entire text box of untranslated Spanish, and while this was an optional chat that didn’t hold story importance, you can also see the distinct punctuation style used in Spanish when completing Mecha-Mole races. These little quirks are the kind of errors you can brush off as cute mistakes, but the fact Talpa Games is just getting their start might be why Mail Mole feels so simple yet not really bad for it. This is a small team putting together their first commercial product and some ideas like the desert level that comes at you are inspired while the movement does hold up to the demands put on it. The overall experience lacks consistency though as weaker or simple ideas are included beside the better ones. The fact it is as smooth as it is overall does speak well for the small team, they just needed to better pick which ideas to follow so that Molty’s small move set would have been more frequently challenged.

THE VERDICT: Most of Mail Mole’s big issues are shaken off before the second world is complete, so even though it gets off to a weak start, it does eventually start introducing some challenging platforming stages or ones with unique concepts. It doesn’t quite escape the overall feeling of forgettable level design though, possibly because much of your time is inherently spent traveling through dirt rather than being asked to constantly engage with level design features. Hidden radishes, Mecha-Mole races, boss encounters, and the late game difficulty increase do mean Mail Mole can be somewhat entertaining though when it has clearer ideas of how it wants to build a challenge.

 

And so, I give Mail Mole for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. If the game had been trapped in the sparse and uncreative level design found in the farm areas and early ruins, Mail Mole would have been on a course to not only be forgettable but outright bad due to overwhelming blandness. However, it starts to pick up as it brings in the speed focused courses, tight platforming windows, and level gimmicks that ask for a bit more from Molty than tunneling around collecting carrots. I’m not going to fault the game for trying to remain non-violent with only indirect battles with boss characters and no enemies to be seen, but some of the more active dangers later in the game like fireballs and bouncing snowballs would have benefited earlier stages as well and iterating on those so you might need to interact with them more with your attacks could have spiced up the moment to moment gameplay. Overall it is definitely the level spread that needs the most work, too many stages feeling generic or introducing ideas that don’t evolve the gameplay enough to stick with the player. Talpa Games clearly does have some fun stage ideas though and you encounter enough of them that it can still be worth playing through this brisk 3D platformer to see them, and full completion is achievable enough that going for radishes and racing the Mecha-Moles makes that extra bit of depth easy to engage with. It doesn’t pack enough punch to move it up a rating, but Mail Mole isn’t a completely run of the mill platformer even with its struggles to find its footing.

 

Mail Mole is a good first start for developer Talpa Games and a sequel that refines things and picks out its level ideas better definitely has the potential to be an easy recommendation. Certain levels in Mail Mole really stand out despite keeping company with a lot of forgettable ones and the difficulty does reach a point where the solid movement mechanics are properly challenged. It’s a game in need of refinement rather than one that failed at what it was attempting, although if Molty is going to go on another adventure, maybe he could afford to spend a little more time above ground. For all the cute costumes he gets, those brief jumps out of the ground don’t really give you a chance to look much at the rewards for all your collectable grabbing. Whether the adorable mole mailman sets out on a new route in the future or not, at least his first adventure turned out pretty alright.